I've re-read the majority of the things I have on my reading list, and I'm coming down to the test-taking time. The only problem is that by stringing this out over more than 6 months, I have loose pieces of information in my head when I need to come to some connected whole.

From now until the time when I take my exam, I'm going to be- brushing up on my essay exam-taking skills- reviewing notes taken while doing the readings (either within the last 6 months or at first reading) and preparing mini-essays to try to integrate pieces from different sections.- doing practice exam questions using questions my Advisor prepares and ones given to previous comps-takers at Maryland. I have these for communications, research methods, and information retrieval, but not for cmc or sts. STS is the one that might cause the most problems because I don't have any examples.

The format of the exam is 2x2hour questions for each of the major areas, 1x2hour question for each of the minor areas, so 8+6= 14 hours exam time to be taken over the course of 5 contiguous working days (but you can have a weekend in the middle). You get a computer that's wiped clean except for a word processing program and you get stuck in a little room and you come out 2 hours later. You can bring water and ear plugs, scrap paper and a pen. Non-native speakers get slightly more time and can bring a dictionary.

Well, you've got paper and pen - so that's probably what I'll use mine for! brainstorming, mind mapping, then maybe outlining (or I can do that with headers in the document).. oh, and Word 2003 or Word 2007? I'd prefer to have 2007, but who knows? Hopefully not just Notepad (eek!)

This is my blog on library and information science. I'm into Sci/Tech libraries, special libraries, personal information management, sci/tech scholarly comms.... My name is Christina Pikas and I'm a librarian in a physics, astronomy, math, computer science, and engineering library. I'm also a doctoral student at Maryland. Any opinions expressed here are strictly my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer or CLIS. You may reach me via e-mail at cpikas {at} gmail {dot} com.